Right at the beginning of this volume, the author makes the following point:

The Notker in question is, of course, the famous monk Notker Labeo of St. Gall (ca. 950–1022), known as arguably the greatest writer of vernacular prose in the Old High German period (coming right at the end of it), and as such a touchstone for anyone interested in the early history of the German language (on all linguistic levels). With regard to Grotans' critical comments in this passage and elsewhere in the book, I can only say mea culpa, and I suspect a goodly number of the readers of this Journal of Germanic Linguistics may be in the same boat. In general, I think, in our concern with the linguistic analysis of historical texts (not just Notker's), we brush right by the context in which they were produced.

Even the title of the book shows that this is not the author's take on Notker's reading and writing activity. While Notker is the central figure in her work, Grotans is interested in a wide range of other questions surrounding him, his monastic environment, his relationship to traditional and medieval commentary practices, the function of the vernacular at St. Gall in general and in the teaching of Latin, and so on. Along the way, she cites at some length relevant texts from many earlier, contemporary, and in the case of Notker's student Ekkehard IV, future grammarians, commentators, and historians.

The book is divided into seven chapters after a 13-page Introduction. In the first, “Medieval reading,” the author points out, importantly for all of the rest of the book, that “reading” (lectio) as understood in early medieval times was firmly rooted in orality, that is, reading aloud, whether to others or to oneself:

Of course, in order to “read” a text properly, one must understand it and be able to perform it properly. Though other medieval commentators on lectio before Notker had worked on ways of making written (Latin) texts more accessible in these respects, it was Notker's revolutionary contribution to approach the vernacular in a similar systematic way, fixing its written form for the purposes of instruction (translation and commentary) on Latin texts, but also working out a “score” for reading it aloud.

In chapter 2, “Education at St. Gall,” the author gives us a general outline, as she puts it, of “what was taught to whom and how?” (p. 9). One might also add “where?,” since she goes into discussions con-sidering the layout and function of buildings (whether actual or proposed) in the St. Gall monastic community, and “in what order?,” given that she describes in some detail the pedagogical sequence of subjects required to produce a competent monastic “reader.” Again, the author shows us both the continuity with earlier traditions to be found in Notker's (and his contemporaries') teaching practice, and the real innovations arising in response to the historical needs of the 10th and early 11th centuries. The pedagogical nature, efficacy, and resonance of Notker's translations and commentaries are treated here in some detail.

Chapter 3, “Language use and choice,” turns to more strictly linguisticin this case sociolinguisticquestions. What was the relative status of the vernacular as opposed to Latin in a monastery like St. Gall, where the linguistic relationship between vernacular and Latin was clearly not the same as in, say, France (medieval French still clearly showing its Latin roots)? Grotans argues that the situation at St. Gall was essentially a diglossic one in which both the High language (Latin) and the Low one (the vernacular) had their functions. She sees as revolution-ary in Notker's work particularly the (for us) commonplace notion that each of the languages in question has its own different set of rules required to speak and write it “correctly” (128). This is, of course, a necessary insight if one is to use the vernacular not merely as an oral crutch in the learning of Latin, but as a systematic written aid in the process. The author argues:

Note that the clear implication of this passage (mooted already in chapter 2 and made more explicit in later chapters) is that people other than Notker were expected to “perform” the written texts, both in Latin and in the vernacular.

In the following chapters, Grotans concentrates more closely on Notker's theoretical writings concerning what one may broadly characterize as “grammar,” and studies the implications that follow from Notker's “standardization” of the vernacular in the areas of word order, punctuation, accentuation, and spelling. Chapter 4, “The St. Gall Tractate,” gives us a close reading of that important text (which Grotans on p. 155 calls a “how-to” book for teaching intermediate Latin reading”), technically of uncertain authorship, but which Grotans believes is most probably the work of Notker. In this work, again drawing from but elaborating upon earlier works by classical and medieval authors, Notker (if it was he) among other things shows how to construe the elements of a (Latin) sentence by rearranging them into a so-called “natural” order (basically that of an SVO language), how to interpret them by assigning them to logical categories such as “subject” and “predicate,” and how to analyze different types of complete sen-tences according to their rhetorical structure. Importantly, part of this analysis involves understanding how to perform orally the material being read, and the St. Gall Tractate duly provides the reader with a number of vocalization cues.

Chapter 5, “Discretio in the classroom,” discusses what we know about the ways that Notker applied the reading methodology of the St. Gall Tractate in his own texts. Here the emphasis is not only on the Latin parts of the texts, where he certainly rearranges sentence elements according to the difficulty of the passages involved, but also on the use of Old High German sections to break up Latin passages into sense units, with commentary. Grotans also devotes in this chapter a lot of attention to Notker's use of punctuation for both syntactic and performance purposes.

Chapter 6, “Accentus,” and chapter 7, “Spelling for reading,” are devoted specifically to the German portions of Notker's texts. Chapter 6 discusses Notker's use of acute and circumflex accent marks in those sections, with a summary treatment of earlier studies attributing their function to a desire to indicate vowel length, stress, or intonation in the form in question. Grotans carefully summarizes what we know about the “rules” for these diacritics, and also the exceptions to the “rules,” with some detailed data-sampling studies of scribal “corrections,” and comes to the conclusion (pp. 266–267):

If I have given the impression in earlier parts of this review that Grotans' main contribution to more formally oriented Germanic linguis-tics is to cast a spotlight on the social, historical, and pedagogical circumstances surrounding the production of Notker's texts, I have done her a disservice. Grotans is a fine linguist, not just a medievalist, and she is extremely aware of the formal discussions surrounding Notker's German, at all linguistic levels. As a result, and by combining this knowledge with her superior knowledge of the cultural context, she is able to propose solutions to problems that from a purely formal perspective seem difficult to resolve. I am thinking here especially of her discussion on pp. 288–307 (in chapter 7, “Spelling for reading”) of perhaps the most famous of all linguistic phenomena associated with Notker, namely what has become known as “Notkers Anlautgesetz” (“Notker's Law”).

The main facts, in brief, are these: The stop consonants deriving in Notker's High Alemannic dialect from Proto-Germanic ⁺/b/, ⁺/θ/, and ⁺/g/ have in Notker's writings a twofold orthographic reflection at the beginnings of words and of morphemes within words. They are found as <p>, <t>, and <k> at the beginning of a sentence or after a pause, and also when following voiceless obstruents that end the preceding word or morpheme within a sentence or word respectively. On the other hand, they are found as <b>, <d>, and <g> after vowels, liquids, or nasals. Grotans uses as an illustration among others the phrase ter brÛoder unde des prÛoder, where both the t/d beginning the article and the p/b beginning the word for “brother” are following these rules.

No matter one's theoretical orientation, these facts have led to a great deal of speculation on the nature of Notker's phonology. In the 19th century, as Grotans shows (pp. 289–290), these centered on the questions of which members of the alternation were more “basic,” and, later, what precise phonetic values (lenis vs. fortis, voiced vs. voiceless?) should be assigned to them. Twentieth-century structural linguists, on the other hand (pp. 290–291), struggled more with the question of whether the alternations were simply allophonic (in which case Notker was capturing an amazingly shallow level of pronunciation) or (morpho)phonemic. Grotans notes (pp. 291–292):

That perspective, as one might expect, is formed by Grotans' understanding that Notker's texts were meant to be read aloud. Noting that these texts were likely read by people of rather different skill levels, she hypothesizes that the least skilled of these readers were likely to have processed sentences initially by means of their syllabic components, pausing briefly between syllables. Later, when their ability to recognize word-units became better, they would probably have paused only between these. The problem is, by Notker's Law only <p>, <t>, and <k> (or more accurately, the sounds they represent) appear word-initially after a pause. The pronounced result at this developmental stage would be an extremely artificial-sounding text consisting entirely of citation forms, with no words starting with <b>, <d>, or <g>. In the previous phrase given by Grotans as an example of Notker's Law, for example, the reading would be ter prÛoder unde tes prÛoder.

Regardless, then, of how shallow a linguistic level Notker's representations of these consonants may have reflected, they guided the reader visually to a more natural and fluent performance of the texts in question. Like the verbal cues Grotans talks about in the earlier chapters, Notker's Law is simply part of the “score” for reading texts out loud, in this case German ones.

When one takes on a book for review, I suspect, one often thinks in the back of one's mind “with the proper amount of work, my skills-set would allow me to write on this subject.” That said, this book on this topic would be quite a stretch for me. Grotans has brought to bear an impressive amount of erudition in classical and medieval fields, a solid understanding of Germanic linguistics and of modern linguistic theory, and a nuanced feeling for language pedagogy, to create a book from which this poor linguist, and I think many others, may learn a great deal about relevant subjects formerly totally out of their ken.